Computers have become an integral part of modern society. They can be found in almost all businesses and homes today, helping to reduce the burdens of repetitive tasks, allowing more time for other more productive activities. Typically, a program or application is created in software that runs on a computer to accomplish the task that was once required to be performed by humans. Thus, applications can be utilized in place of manual labor, often yielding superior results in a much shorter amount of time. The size of these applications have grown exponentially over time and some are quite complex. In order to support more powerful applications, additional computer resources are required such as computational resources and memory. The increases in application sizes and resource utilization have also yielded increased startup times and processing times.
For example, a user may desire to write a quick note to send out to a friend. The user could use a word processing application to accomplish this. However, modern word processing applications are often packed with additional features that allow them to be utilized in many different tasks. They may have spreadsheet interaction capabilities, drawing package attributes, database management tools, format conversion capabilities, advanced math symbology, multiple font selections, advanced text formatting tools, page formatting options, printing preview tools, etc. All of these capabilities might be unnecessary to send a quick note to a friend. The user most likely would prefer launching a small application, typing the short note, and sending it to their friend. If the user has to wait for the entire word processor application to load into the computer, they may decide that it takes too long and not write the note.
As a way to speed up applications, significantly smaller-sized applications called “widgets” were created that allowed a user to accomplish tasks in a much shorter time. These widgets are small purpose-built applications that typically accomplish singular tasks. In general, a widget does not require the same level of system resources to run as a full application does and can be started quickly. Widgets have become very popular, even too popular. Today there appears to be a widget for every task imaginable. Users typically download these widgets to their desktops so that they can quickly find and start them. The “store on the desktop” schema works well when a user has only a few widgets. However, as users download more and more widgets, this schema often causes widgets to overrun a user's desktop. So, eventually users have to organize their widgets in some form of hierarchy such as in folders and databases. And, although they may be stored in an orderly fashion, it is now more difficult to quickly find and start an appropriate widget when a task becomes desirable. This difficulty will continually increase as the number of widgets increases. Since widgets are becoming more popular each day, more and more users will become frustrated with trying to locate and employ their favorite widgets.